Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes Read Free Page B

faster than I thought possible. A look
spread across his face, as though his brain synapses were live electric wires
and what I said had jolted them. Like a buzz spread through his skull, across
his forehead and through his cheeks. He held up a finger.
     
    “Rule one, Ella. We never try to
prove something is true. What do you get if you are trying to prove something
to be true?”
     
    I looked up at the ceiling. I had the
term on the tip of my tongue. My brain wasn’t working well today. Maybe I was
coming down with a cold.
     
    “I guess you’d try to make facts fit
what you were looking for.”
     
    “Confirmation bias.” he said.
     
    He walked over to the window and
looked out. I couldn’t see the view with him stood in the way. He turned back
around and faced me.
     
    “Always try to prove something to be
false. That’s our game. Look for the doubt. Find the bullshit.” he said.
     
    “But won’t that also be confirmation
bias? Confirmation that something isn’t true?”
     
    “True, but this is the good kind. Because
I’m looking for something to be real. I want a fucking real life mystery that
shows there’s something else to this world, Ella. And before I do that, I want
to know I’ve put it through the wringer. That I’ve looked through it so
carefully that there’s no room for doubt.”
     
    I needed a pen and paper. I wanted to
make some notes, because my assignment had suddenly come to mind. Finding out
Jeremiah’s motivation for what he did was going to be one of my focal points,
and he had just handed part of it to me on a plate. “I want a real life
mystery that shows there’s something else to this world.” There you had it;
that’s why he travelled the world on a whim.
     
    There was more to it, I sensed.
Wanting a sense of the other, that was a common idea. That was why UFO
sightings, the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot all picked up so much attention.
As science gets better at explaining why the world behaves the way it does,
right down to the atoms bouncing against each other in a blade of grass, 
people crave mystery.
     
     We don’t want to know exactly why
things happen. So we invent things that can’t be explained, can’t be proven.
Nobody can ever prove that UFOs don’t exist. They can disprove an individual
sighting, sure, but you could never disprove all of them. The mystery of them
excites people. It  gives them the hope that there might be something else in
the world other than the grim reality that we all muddle through.
     
    So what about Jeremiah? Was it
escapism for him? I looked at him as he perched against the window frame. He
wore black jeans that were tucked into heavy Doc Martin books. He wore a thick
jumper, a shirt collar poking out of the top. Practical clothes for the cold
Scottish countryside. I saw a man who was dedicated to his calling to the
exclusion of everything else. His whole life was probably an act of escapism,
and it must have been from something in his past.
     
    Was it this Bruges incident that the
professor was so obsessed with finding out about?
     
    Jeremiah walked to bed and sat down
again. “So I’ll ask again. What do you think we should do next?”
     
    Oh good, I was getting chance to
repeat my exam.
     
    “If we’re going to prove that
everything in the letter is false, we should start with the facts. And the
biggest one for me is the little girl. Let’s prove that no little girl died in
the village recently. That should put the whole thing to bed.”
     
    I realised that I was talking about
the death of a little girl brazenly, as though this were an academic exercise.
What if we checked this and there really was a little girl who died? A sad
little girl who killed herself, as the letter said? This becoming a little too
real for me. I was used to the abstract comfort of textbooks.
     
    Jeremiah nodded his head. “A good a
place to start as any. That’s what we’ll do, tomorrow then. Tonight we get some
sleep.”
     
    I